Background
One of the great features of R Markdown is using it
to create static websites. These websites can be quite simple with only
a single page or more complex with multiple pages and options, such as
the website for this course. Websites created with R
Markdown can be viewed/hosted directly on
GitHub or Netlify, or copied
over to a server such as http://students.washington.edu.
Setup
For this exercise, we’ll create a simple personal website and host it
on GitHub. Although you can display a static website
from any GitHub repo, we’ll use special repo with the
same name as your GitHub username.
Create a repo
Create a new repo on GitHub called USERNAME.github.io
where USERNAME is your actual GitHub username.
In the Description box, type (or copy/paste) “This
is the development repo for my personal website”.
Make the repo Public.
Despite GitHub’s urging, DO NOT add a README,
.gitignore or license file.
Click the green Create repository button when you’re
finished.
Create RStudio project
The next step is to create a new project in RStudio.
However, rather than base this new project on an existing repo, as we’ve
done in the past, we’ll instead choose New
Directory.
Scroll down the options for Project Type and select
Postcards Website.
In the next Create Postcards Website window, enter
your own GitHub username in the field for
Directory name:
Choose the location where you’d like this new project to live.
Select the Trestles template from the drop-down
menu.
When you are finished, check the box next to
Open in new session and click the Create
Project button.
Postcards website
You now have a very simply RStudio project with 3
files:
index.Rmd
frank.jpg
YOUR_USERNAME.Rproj (where
YOUR_USERNAME is your GitHub
username)
Content
The index.Rmd file contains the information to be
displayed on your website. When first created, it should look like
this:
The top section is a standard YAML that contains 4 fields:
title
image
links
output
Title
The title field in index.Rmd is the title
of your website that will be displayed at the top. Go ahead and change
this from Frank Mermosillo to something relative to you.
For example, your first and last names would be good options.
Image
The image field in index.Rmd shows the name
of the picture that will be displayed on your website. At present, it’s
set to frank.jpg, so you should change this to be the name
of a picture/photo you’d rather have displayed. A headshot is always a
great choice, but you could use an avatar or any other image you’d
like.
Note: whatever name/file you choose, you’ll need to
move or copy that image file to the folder/directory where this project
lives.
Links
The next block that begins with links contains a list of
label/url pairs. These will be buttons on your website that
someone could click to direct them to other information about you
elsewhere. The last label/url pair is for your email
address. Not all of these label/url pairs are necessary, so
you can delete any of them if you’d like. You can also add more of them
if you’d like even more options for others. Go ahead and edit/delete/add
any options you’d like here.
When you are finished, your YAML section should resemble something
like this:
Build the site
Let’s go ahead and preview our website, which simply requires you to
press the Knit button in the editor pane. When you do,
RStudio will open a preview of your website in a new
viewer window that should look something like this:
From here on, anytime you make a change to the content in
index.Rmd you can just click the Knit button
to instantly generate a preview.
Personal details
Now it’s time to edit index.Rmd so it contains
information about you instead of Frank. At present there are headings
and content for these sections:
You can edit any of these heading names and corresponding content to
meet your personal preferences. Because this information is all written
with standard Markdown, you can take advantage of any
of the additional formatting options.
For example, the university and company names in the example template
are enclosed with double-asterisks (**) so that they render
in bold type. You could add an (un)ordered list,
different heading levels, links to other URLs, equations, or additional
images.
Here is an example of what your website could look like after you’ve
edited the sections and content.
Set up version control
Once you have a complete draft of your website, it would be a good
time to commit our local changes. Before we can do so, though, we need
to place this project under version control with Git.
There are 3 different ways to do this, each of which is equally
effective.
In the shell, navigate via cd to the project’s
directory and type git init.
At the command prompt in RStudio, type
usethis::use_git().
From the main menu in RStudio,
- select
Tools > Project Options...
- click on
Git/SVN in the left column
- select
Git from the
Version control system: dropdown menu
- click OK when you are finished
- you will be asked if you want to create a git repository; select
Yes
- you will be asked if you want to restart RStudio;
select Yes
You should now see a Git pane in
RStudio several untracked files waiting to be
committed.
Before we commit the files, let’s go ahead and delete the picture of
Frank that was included in the project when it was created. In the
File pane in RStudio check the box
next to frank.jpg and then click the Delete
button.
Now go ahead and commit your local changes to all of the files in the
Git pane. Note, though, that we haven’t yet connected
this repo to GitHub, so you can’t actually push your
changes to the cloud.
Connecting to GitHub
Now that you have a draft of your website, it’s time to connect this
local RStudio project to the GitHub
repo we created at the beginning of this exercise. To do so, follow
these steps:
- Click on the two purple boxes and a white square in the
Git pane.
- In the field for
Remote Name: enter origin
and in the field for Remote URL: copy/paste the URL of your
GitHub repo (this should be
https://github.com/USERNAME/USERNAME.github.io where
USERNAME is your actual GitHub
username).
When you are finished, click Add and
RStudio will respond with a window showing you that
your local main branch is set up to track the remote branch
on GitHub, and that files you committed above have been
pushed to your GitHub repo.
Note: If clicking Add instead takes
you back to the *RStudio does not allow to click the
New branch window and the Create
button is grayed out, enter main in
Branch name: field and then click
Create.
Let’s verify that everything has indeed been pushed to
GitHub by navigating to your repo there and refreshing
the browser. You should now see several files listed there.
Viewing on GitHub
To view your website on GitHub, simply navigate over
to USERNAME.github.io where USERNAME is your
actual GitHub username. You should see something like this.
Other layouts
Postcards
At this point you should be all set up to make changes to your
website design in RStudio and push them to
GitHub when you’re finished. For example, we chose the
Trestles template for our layout, but there are others
available (see Sean Kross’ postcard
templates). To switch to a different theme, simply change the YAML
line
output:
postcards::trestles
to be something like
output:
postcards::jolla_blue